Nathanael West‘s The Day of the Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a painter trying to survive in Hollywood while planning his masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.”
Hackett is surrounded by dubious characters: an actress as beautiful as she is talentless (who he pines for), her father “a vaudeville clown turned con man,” a dim cowboy (with whom Tod competes, along with a hapless Midwesterner, for the aforementioned actress’s affections), and other rogues and ruffians of 1930s L.A.
Richard Rayner, like West, is a writer living in Los Angeles. In “Nathanael West and the Writing of ‘The Day of the Locust,’” Rayner examines West’s relationship with Hollywood and his novel, which portrays a city that “erases memory, replacing it with sensations that inscribe themselves on the mind like vivid nightmares, only to be immediately forgotten.”
